Shoulder Fire
crooked grace
The air broke sometime before dawn
Humidity wrung out of it
The windows are open now
A breeze moving through the house
like cool lake water
Three nights of storms
Old trees shedding limbs
Branches scattered
Everything smells torn open
Wet bark, black earth,
the green bite of snapped stems
The bee balm leans hard toward the ground
Roots showing, a little dirt still holding on
Milkweed, cardinal flowers, primrose
Tangled in the grass
Ants thick across the sticky stalks
Pink and red blooms staring sideways
As though the whole bed has slipped a few degrees
The water runs swollen,
dragging sticks and leaves through the shallows
The made-land softened where the waves climbed out
Built on the unceded deep, on limestone and old debris,
the shore holds its breath
The ground here remembers being water
The Crow knows this,
That’s why it laughs
The Robin knows it, too
That’s why it sings
Dragonflies are back already
Working the air above the washout,
blue as nothing happened
But the Red-winged Blackbirds flare above the cattails
flashing shoulder-fire,
diving at anything that gets too close to the nest
Beyond the trees the lake is busy with its own weather
Grey water, whitecaps
A horizon too far away to touch any of this
The wind keeps moving west
The river keeps moving west, too
forced backward against the map,
running upstream through the concrete,
away from its own mouth
My lungs take the air in slow,
jaw bone aching for every split branch
A phantom heat settles across my own shoulders,
old weight finally giving way to sun
The soles of my shoes feel the thrum of the lakefill
the stolen stone, the buried rubble
trying to settle
The flowers remain there
Half pulled from the soil
bent,
blooming
So I let the grass hold my shadow for a while, too
Even though the ground under me is wrong,
the water runs backward
but my skin is warm
Blood keeps its own direction
Without intending to, I think this poem is the third in a sort of series that materialized on its own. Find the first two parts here below.
Part I
Part II
Thanks for being here.
Until next time,
j
“Wet bark, black earth,
the green bite of snapped stems” is a lovely line that I think will stick in my mind for a while. Lovely work!
Those red winged blackbirds 🐦⬛